Monday, January 14, 2008

That must be a generation thing: I am not a big user of text messages (SMS). But every time I get to do a trip in Europe, I come back with a renewed interest in text messaging.

Here comes Joopz, that I discovered through Russ. Russ says he loves the service. Love is a big word, so I had to give it a spin. The premise is that Joopz lets you send and receive text messages from their web site. It is free up to 50 messages sent per month, and $3/month after that (unlimited).

It sounds good. But this is not a service I will be using. When I sent a message to you with Joopz, you get from a weird number; in my test, this was: (010) 10-0001. Then the message reads: FRM: 14085555555-kjfj@joopz.com MSG: My message here. This is bad for 2 reasons:

This is not user friendly for the recipient of the message: you have to decode the content of the message, figure that 4085555555 must be the phone number of the sender, and go find who that person is. This just doesn't look like a regular text message.

This looks like a message sent through an email to SMS gateway. That is: a message the sender didn't pay to send. But the recipient is paying to receive the message. And then paying again to respond. To me that reads as I want to talk to you and I don't want to pay, but you will pay to get my messages and to respond. That doesn't send a good message ;).

I would love to be able to send text messages from my computer (and it's even better if I can save some money in the process). For now at least Joopz just isn't the service that will allow me to do so.

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Co-founder of Orbeon, developing Orbeon Forms: web forms, open source, for the enterprise. Passionate about technology, and how it improves the world.

Orbeon

At Orbeon, we want to make complex forms easier to create and easier to use. We believe in web technologies, in standards, in open source, and in great customer support. Our product, Orbeon Forms, is open source, implements XForms (a W3C standard), enables you to create forms that can be used on all mainstream browsers. We develop and provide professional support for Orbeon Forms.

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